By The FirstRep. Matt Gaetz of Florida is speaking out, claiming he and other Republican members of congress are being “threatened” into voting for Rep. Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House. Gaetz is part of a small group of conservatives who are refusing to back McCarthy’s bid to run the House.
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“We were threatened by my committee chairman to be on the armed services committee, Mr. Rodgers, that if we did not vote for Mr. McCarthy we would be removed from our committees,” Gaetz told the press. “Our position is that if Kevin McCarthy is the Speaker of the House and we don’t have an ability to ensure that there is “oomph” behind the agenda, and energy behind our oversight, that the committee assignments don’t mean anything anyway.”
“I’m not here to participate in some puppet show,” Gaetz added. “I don’t want to relive the Benghazi experience where it’s just theater pretending to be oversight.”
McCarthy will need 218 votes to take the speaker’s gavel, but as of early Tuesday morning he still did not have enough support.
